A collection of best practice articles to help grow companies with an emphasis on finance. The goal of the blog is to explain how these best practices work, enabling anyone to put these ideas to immediate use. Articles are written by Matt H. Evans, CPA, CMA, CFM

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NOTE: Effective January 1, 2017, I will no longer post new articles since I am now fully retired.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Machines of Loving Grace

Machines
of Loving Grace is the title of a book written by John Markoff. Markoff is
a science writer for the New York Times who has followed technology for the
last 30 years. In the last few years, we have seen an escalation of
technologies, ranging from drones and robots to Artificial Intelligence and the
Internet of Things. This has prompted some of our best thinkers to challenge
what is happening. Stephen Hawking has remarked: “the development of full
artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Bill Gates and
Elon Musk have both voiced concerns about the birth of super intelligence or
machines that can think.

However,
Markoff offers a balanced and interesting view on how technology will impact
everyone. Markoff breaks it down between two fronts: Artificial Intelligence
(AI) and Intelligent Augmentation (IA).AI is about building systems that replicate human capabilities and IA is
about extending what humans do through the use of technology. In the past,
these two fronts were quite distinct, never crossing over. But now the lines
are becoming very blurred and therein lies the next technological revolution. In just the last two years, we have seen agricultural
drones enabling higher crop yields, neuromorphic chips configured like human
brains, agile robots walking across uneven terrain and genome editing for
diagnosing brain disorders.

Do It Yourself brain scientists
or neurohackers are hard at work in Brooklyn trying to decrypt brainwaves.
These young entrepreneurs are part of NeuroTechX, an international
collaboration of researchers and inventors working on projects such as
Cloudbrain. Cloudbrain is a set of artificial intelligence machine-learning
algorithms that looks at patterns, explaining how we speak and allowing our thoughts
to directly control devices.

·Advances in 3-D printing that create
just-in-time inventory threaten the jobs of 320 million manufacturing workers
around the world

·Automation of knowledge will have a $ 5 trillion
to $ 7 trillion impact on white-collar jobs

·Renewable energy, such as solar which has
decreased in cost by more than 85% will shift economic power away from
countries supported by fossil fuels

"In the 2030s, we
are going to send nano-robots into the brain (via capillaries) that will
provide full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system and will
connect our neocortex to the cloud. Just like how we can wirelessly expand the
power of our smartphones 10,000-fold in the cloud today, we'll be able to
expand our neocortex in the cloud." - Ray Kurzweil, Director of
Engineering for Google

However, Markoff (pictured
on the left) explains that despite this massive disruption, many jobs will also
get created. According to Forrester Research, 22.7 million jobs will be lost by
2025, or 16% of the workforce. However, another 13.6 million jobs will get
created in areas such as software engineering, automation design, and support
services; resulting in a net loss of 9.1 million jobs in ten years.

Markoff also
believes that technology has limitations when it comes to scaling. It seems
most of us believe that technology can scale indefinitely - faster processing
times (scaling up) or less physical storage (scaling down). However, Markoff
notes that some things are no longer scaling such as the cost of
transistors.

Markoff also
divides technological change in terms of generations; i.e. each generation will
view and use technology differently. This also applies to different cultures.
For example, in China where people often do not have time alone, young users of
the most advanced ChatBot have “toilet time.” They engage in conversations that
almost become addictive. A survey found that 25% of the users ended their
conversations with the ChatBot by saying: “I love you.”

“Data-driven statistical machine learning
will allow us to surpass human performance in many areas, from solving the
hardest crossword in the blink of an eye to proposing architectural designs for
cities. For autonomous systems such as service robots, it will be critical to
attain sufficient moral competence in order for them to navigate the
complexities and intricacies of human, social and moral norms without causing
us unnecessary harm.” – Matthias Scheutz, Professor of Cognitive and Computer
Science, Tuft University

Another great
reporter from the New York Times, Thomas Friedman has also discussed the IT Revolution,
indicating that it is flying under the radar without much publicity. According
to Friedman, the IT Revolution is the biggest thing happening on the planet
today. It will change every job, every school and every industry. We are going from
connected to hyper-connected and from inter-connected to inter-dependent. No
one is talking about it, but everyone is living it. Friedman jokes that the
Receptionist in his office has been replaced by a micro-chip.

The jobs of
the future will be those jobs that interact with the robots.Obtaining
special certifications in fields such as artificial intelligence and physical
robotic systems will be your key to securing a job. Take for example DeepQA, a
software architecture that does deep content analysis and evidence-based
reasoning. DeepQA analyzes natural language input and delivers relevant answers
from a combination of existing natural language text and databases.Another example is the robo-advisor. Venture
Capitalist are providing over $ 1 Billion to fund the development of these
services. According to A.T. Kearney, “Robo-advisory services will become
mainstream over the next three to five years.”

“Industries will be transformed. Major
companies will fall. Old systems will collapse as entrepreneurs figure out how
to optimize and reinvent inefficient businesses, products, and services to
provide consumers (us) with all things better, faster and cheaper. According to
the Olin School of Business, 40% of today's Fortune 500 companies will be gone
in the next 10 years.” – Peter Diamandis, co-author of Bold and Chairman of
Singularity University

Tom Friedman
recommends that everyone “invent” their own job. As Friedman says, “everyone
should become a paranoid optimist” and take extreme individual initiative in
order to survive. Markoff also expresses concerns over what is happening, noting
that a “tremendous amount of power and responsibility” is in the hands of
designers behind artificial
intelligence (when a robot replaces a human) vs. intelligence augmentation
(when a robot is an auxiliary assistant to a human). Markoff refers to Norbert
Wiener, the MIT mathematician whose book Cybernetics touched off the first
debate about robots and the future. To quote Wiener: “We can be humble and live
a good life with the aid of the machines or we can be arrogant and die.”

Perhaps the
well-known Astro Physicist Neil Desgrasse Tyson sums it up best: We should not
get too comfortable with our apps and devices, thinking that we are somehow
well-informed through the use of these technologies. But instead we should
recognize that it is the arts and sciences that have always defined
civilizations. And because we face huge issues – transportation, energy,
hunger, climate to name a few, we should never separate ourselves from these
realities. This is how we keep the current technological revolution grounded in
reality, by staying informed on what defines us and the issues impacting our
future.